HomeScreen

Your life, in one place.

We know how stressful a busy life can be. From soccer practices, to work and social events, it can be hard to schedule in those much needed moments together as a family. The HomeScreen Apple TV app is created with the always on-the-go family in mind and acts as your own personal planner by comparing schedules and displaying weather, all located right in your living room.

Features

We’ve reimagined how planning is done in the digital age. Running on Apple TV 4, the newest device that now has its own app store, HomeScreen is designed to make your life easier by providing a hub for all of the information most important to you and your family. The main screen of the app provides a large five-day calendar view for planning or checking each day’s schedule. Different colors represent each family member and HomeScreen compares each family member’s schedule together to make suggestions. These suggestions answer common questions that families may have when trying to coordinate. What time can my spouse and I get lunch? Will the kids need a jacket on their hiking trip this weekend? The bottom of the screen allows you to click through to the other features, weather and photos. The weather button replaces the calendar view with a five-day weather forecast, while the photos button brings up photos in an iCloud shared folder so families and friends can look at vacation photos together.

Why

There is no easy way to sit down and quickly compare your calendar to multiple people around you. Most people keep their personal calendar on one of their devices, but comparing your calendar to others in your family involves a lot of scrolling or finally resorting to paper when trying to make a list of important information. You could all speak over each other while reading off your paper planners or feverishly swap between your calendar and notes app, but those are not great options.

HomeScreen solves this problem by automatically comparing everyone’s schedule together, answers your tough questions, and even suggests events at times when you aren’t busy. HomeScreen also has other insights like measuring the amount of traffic, comparing it to an estimated distance from home, and then suggesting an optimal time for dinner.

How

Using Xcode, Apple’s interface for building apps, our team created a native TVOS app for the Apple TV. New to most recent iteration of Apple TV’s is an app store, allowing third-party apps to be downloaded to the device. The app imports weather from a weather service and your calendar and photos from iCloud after signing in with a family sharing account.

We will also make use of the multidirectional gestures included on the new remote. We will use the swiping gestures to navigate through the app and move between the photos.

New gestures on the Apple TV remote.

Group

Evelyn Andrews

Programmer

Evelyn is a senior public affairs journalism major interested in making important news interesting and how technology advancements will affect the industry. Responsible for programming, Evelyn is working in xCode to build the app and applying javascript to make it work.

Alana Casto

Content Producer

Alana is a junior mass media arts major interested in film editing and the effect new media and technology have on the ever-changing film business. Alana is responsible for creating content for the app, including the promotional video and working alongside the Visual Designer to create graphics.

Maddie Carswell

Visual Designer

Maddie is a senior public relations major interested in how the media is adapting the growth of technology. Maddie is responsible for visual design and the overall look of the app, which includes developing the graphics with the content producer.

Eric Daniel

Producer

Eric is a senior marketing major with a love for the unlimited possibilities that come with new media technologies. He is responsible for the overall vision and management of HomeScreen, and works alongside the rest of the team to ensure seamless presentations and an excellent finished product.